


Five Apocalyptic Earths John Crichton Never Encountered

by cofax



Category: Farscape
Genre: Apocafic, Crossover, Gen, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-17
Updated: 2009-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 04:49:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five crossovers in which John Crichton meets the apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Apocalyptic Earths John Crichton Never Encountered

**Author's Note:**

> For this I blame [](http://abyssinia4077.livejournal.com/profile)[**abyssinia4077**](http://abyssinia4077.livejournal.com/).

1\. _Blessed_

They came in low, fast and silent, sliding in along Earth's axis and then running north just above the water. Unless things had changed a hell of a lot in the last few years, there wasn't any way for anyone to spot them. They made landfall just before dawn in Ballard Pines, and buried the pod as deep as they could in a copse of trees next to Route 1. From there, they walked. John figured they'd hit a 7-Eleven within a half a mile, and from there he could call Dad, or Liv, and... well, then they'd see.

By full light, they'd passed three convenience stores and two gas stations, all closed. Even the Starbucks at the south end of the strip mall was dark and silent, as though it were Christmas morning. Except John was pretty sure it wasn't. And the streets weren't empty; there was plenty of traffic, although after a block--

"The vehicles are all driving north," said Aeryn, and put a hand on her hip where her pistol should have been. "Should they be?"

John shook his head, careful not to shake the baby-backpack where D'Argo was sleeping. "Not unless it's a hurricane evacuation, and we'd have noticed that kind of weather. Something's going on."

So they went north, too, walking the shoulder of the commercial roads, being passed by one car after another, and the occasional bicycle. A woman riding a low-slung bike with butterfly handlebars crossed the road in front of them, pedalling hard. She shouted something at them as she passed, but John couldn't tell what she said.

"Don't be late," said Aeryn, frowning. "Late for what?"

At the next major light was a big-box complex, housing a WalMart and a Home Depot, surrounded by acres of parked cars. The cars overflowed the parking lot and filled the streets, with only a single lane left open in either direction. This was where everyone had been going. "Where's the cops?" John wondered.

At the far end of the parking lot there was what looked like a stage, surrounded by thousands of people. Maybe tens of thousands: John figured everyone in the surrounding couple of towns was here. There must have been a sound system: John could hear someone speaking, but couldn't discern the words, not at this distance. "We have to get closer," he said, although he really didn't want to. He didn't like this, not even a little bit. Towns don't shut down so everyone can attend a--what, a political rally? A concert?

They paused at a corner of the building, looking out over the sea of cars and the crowd beyond it. "I think we should leave," said Aeryn.

"Let's just... look, you stay here with D, I'll go check it out. Okay?"

Aeryn gave him a long and dubious look, but finally nodded. John unstrapped the backpack and shifted the soft and heavy weight of his son into Aeryn's arms. She put the backpack on the ground, propping D'Argo in the shade, and reached around to her back. "Take this," she said, handing John the pistol.

"Aeryn..."

"If you're going alone, you're going armed. Or I come with you."

"Fine." John took the pistol and stuffed it down the back of his jeans--which made them even less comfortable than they already were. He must have put on some weight since the last time he'd worn them. "I'll be back in two hundred microts."

There wasn't enough room in the open space for everyone who had gathered: as John came closer to the center, he saw more and more people crowded between the cars, or on them, attention focused on the stage. They were all kinds of people, too: elderly and young, toddlers and teens; black, white, and many shades of brown; men and women both. All of them but the very youngest were standing upright, watching and listening with great attention--to what?

John figured he wasn't going to get much closer without someone paying attention to him--no one else in the crowd was moving at all, and besides being kind of weird, it made his motion pretty obvious. He came to a halt next to a lime green TransAm with neon rims, and cocked his head to listen to the loudspeaker.

"Like Amica, we all stray from the path, the path of truth, the path of obedience! But our lords are ever-loving, ever-forgiving: if we are truly penitent, we shall be forgiven our sins and accepted back into the fold!"

Huh. It was like scripture, except John was pretty sure the Old Testament was monotheistic.

A thump came over the loudspeaker, as of someone slamming a book down on a wooden table, and John, squinting into the sunlight, saw someone hold a stick over his head, from which an enormous flame erupted, to hover over the stage, apparently with no source. "The Ori see into your heart! They know if you are truly repentent! False spirits will not protect you from the justice of the Ori!"

The crowd swayed, every adult clutching something to his or her chest--a book, it looked like.

"Blessed are the Ori!" howled the man on the stage.

"Blessed are the Ori," repeated every single person in the crowd.

"Jesus _fuck_!" muttered John.

~

 

2\. _Disparu_

Apparently "closed" isn't a verb that takes, when it comes to wormholes. They've been running for -- John has no idea, actually, how long they've been running. Long enough for Chiana's hair to reach her shoulders, and for Little D to go from seated to staggering with no stop at crawling.

Every port is closed to them, every option blocked, and at the end John knows better, he does, but Aeryn's watching him over their son's sleeping body, and John meets her eyes, wipes his hand over his face, and goes back down to the Den with his oldest journal in his hands.

Thirty-six arns later, they pop out of the wormhole at what John has figured ought to be about four light-minutes from Earth. Far enough away that they can get a good look at what's going on without anyone spotting them.

Jothee is at the controls, while John changes D'Argo on the central table. Two DRDs are meeping furiously at his feet, but John's long since gotten over his squeamishness about poop. It'll clean.

"Crichton," says Jothee, and there's that tone in his voice, the one John hates to hear. It's the one that says, "We're in trouble."

John yanks D's pants back up over his diaper and sweeps him off the table, depositing him on the floor next to 1812. D squeals cheerfully and grabs for the DRD, which backs up and beeps at him teasingly. Who knew DRDs were so babyproof?

"What is it?" John takes a look out the viewscreen, looks at the control panel, then back at the screen. "Who the fuck are those guys?"

"I thought you said Earth had no space-faring capability," says Jothee. At least a dozen ships of various sizes are gathered together perhaps ten thousand kilometers away: John can't tell if they're a convoy, or a battle, or just a really big polo team.

As they watch, a large ship of an unfamiliar and bizarre design--a flattened disk attached to a three horizontal cylinders--turns and begins to approach. "Um," says John. "Pilot, you recognize these guys?"

"I am sorry, Commander, but these ships are nowhere in Moya's database."

"What is wrong now?" Aeryn snaps as she strides into command, scooping D'Argo up without even pausing.

John's staring at the readouts on the control panel, baffled. "I think we might have gone sideways." Shit. He was _sure_ he'd managed to avoid that, this time. Something bangs on the hull, and John jumps. "Pilot?"

Pilot's face appears in the viewscreen briefly, overlaying the image of that one ship approaching. "There is a great deal of debris here, Crichton. I very much fear--"

"Frell." Aeryn's voice is flat and hard: John looks up. She points to the navigational schematic on the control panel, then back at the viewscreen. "That's where Earth is supposed to be, John. _It's not there._"

"Commander Crichton, we are receiving a signal from the approaching ship."

A stunningly beautiful black woman with a long ponytail appears on the viewscreen. Her mouth moves and John's startled to realize that her lips actually _match her words_. "This is the starship _Enterprise_ hailing alien vessel--"

_Oh, we are so frelled._

~

 

3\. _Metal_

They don't get anywhere near the surface.

Earth's _there_, but the people are gone. All Pilot can identify are machines, crawling, digging, rolling, flying. Like maggots on the blackened and bloody corpse.

It takes him three cycles to forgive himself for even trying to go back. He never wanted to see that, and now he's always going to wonder if it was something he did.

~

 

4\. _Brimstone_

Their timing could have been better. Although John's not sure how it could have been _worse_.

St. Aidan's is an old-fashioned Roman Catholic Church, the kind with an attached elementary school and even a rambling old house where the nuns live. The priests are either old and white, or young and Asian--John thinks they're maybe Vietnamese, but he can't ever get close enough to them to ask, not that it matters anyway.

The schoolyard is a tent city: tarpaulins are strung from the chain-link fence next to neat geodesic domes straight from REI, and lengths of particle-board tilt against the outside wall of the church to form rough lean-tos. John hasn't counted, but he figures there's a couple hundred people here, squashed into the rectangle formed by the church, the school, and the residence, all huddled together for defence against the horror outside. Aeryn and John have taken over about thirty square feet of the school yard, by way of lashing an enormous blue tarp (liberated from a Costco in Elgin) to the climbing structure.

Which is not to say they have any privacy in their little den under the monkey bars (it was less fun than he'd have expected, explaining "monkey bars" to Aeryn): there are four smaller bodies curled up next to John when he wakes each morning. Okay, so one of them's a dog, but it's impossible to have more than the simplest exchange with Aeryn without three pairs of brown eyes watching them.

They found the kids outside of Omaha, on day four after the world ended: two girls, maybe seven and four, and a boy a little younger, all walking down the highway under that horrifying green-black sky. They might be siblings, might not, since they haven't said a thing since John stopped the truck and Aeryn slung them into the back next to the ragged-eared spaniel he'd found drinking from an oil slick the day before. The kids latched onto the dog, who was deliriously happy for the company, and spent the next two days just _watching_ John and Aeryn, before he finally convinced them that the box of Froot Loops he'd liberated from a 7-Eleven wasn't poisoned.

John's still not sure this isn't one big alien mind-fuck. Because seriously: what the hell? About thirty minutes after he set the transport pod down in a Nebraska cornfield, twenty minutes of which were spent arguing with a pissed-off yokel in a John Deere cap, the world ended.

Okay, so not entirely. Just... there was an unholy boom, like a mountain fell, and huge dark clouds came boiling up from the southeast, and as they were running for the barn, the ground behind them erupted. The transport pod disappeared entirely--taking their spare pulse pistols, three cases of food cubes, and John's long leather coat with it. And that was it. Three years running from the Peacekeepers and the Nebari and the Scarrans, and John got Aeryn back to Earth just in time to get stranded there by the Apocalypse.

Nobody knows what really happened that day, except that a lot of people died right away, and now every couple of days someone shows up with black eyes like something out of a Stephen King novel, and they're telekinetic, superpowered, and galactically nasty. The only things that seem to work against the fuckers are salt and holy water, and John really didn't enjoy explaining any of that to Aeryn. Seeing as Peacekeepers don't even believe in the afterlife, much less the whole heaven, hell, demons and angels thing. On the other hand, Aeryn's as pragmatic as they come, and she's seen Father Fitz exorcise two people already. The first thing she asked after that was how come John didn't know the Ritual Romanum, if it was so useful.

They spend a week at St. Aidan's. On the seventh day, John goes to take his shift at the church door and finds Aeryn there before him, weapon in her hand. On the stair below her, unblinking in the face of the pulse pistol, are a short white guy in an overcoat and a red-haired girl with a sword in her hand.

That's when things get _really_ weird.

~

 

5\. _Subterranean_

He nearly gets flattened. Later, John can't even reconstruct the sequence of events by which he realized there was a problem with the wormhole, reduced his velocity, and emerged from the wormhole opening at just the right angle to avoid slamming into a steel wall a mere fifteen yards away.

Instead, he twists the module into an insanely tight spiral _up_ the inside of a fucking _silo_, while his radio explodes with chatter.

"Holy shit!"

He's immensely grateful for the Hetch drive, though, since there's a cap on the silo--he's gotta go back down, and he'd never have been able to do that with the IASA drive he started with. It's not pretty, mind you, but he gets it down, with only a few dings on the paint job, and then stares in disbelief at the people looking down at him from the plate glass window above.

Those are men and women in American uniforms.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this isn't just one more mind game played by yet another godlike alien, John Crichton might finally have found his way home. He pops the hatch and gives the old guy behind the window a wave.

... "Snakes? Oh, you are fucking _kidding me_."

 

END

**ETA:** Y'all must read what [](http://radiotelescope.livejournal.com/profile)[**radiotelescope**](http://radiotelescope.livejournal.com/) has [added in the comments!](http://cofax7.livejournal.com/665654.html?thread=9501750#t9501750)


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